Category: General IT Info

Sometimes you create a VMware image and later realize that you should have made the drive size larger. Fortunately in VMWare Workstation you can change the size of a disk with a simple command line program. But the command only makes your drive bigger not the actual partition the operating system resides on. It is possible to get around this problem without purchasing a product like Partition Magic. There is a free program from the OpenSource and Linux world called “QTParted”. So the first thing you need to do is resize the drive by issuing the VMware command line to resize the disk (in this case to 10Gb):

vmware-vdiskmanager -x 10GB myDisk.vmdk

Then you set the VMware session to boot off a Knoppix ISO CD image. Then run QTParted. Select the Windows Drive partition with the right mouse button and chose reseize, set the new size, and then commit the change. Your disk’s OS partition has now been increased with all data intact.

There isn’t a traditional power-on switch on ATX computer power supplies so if you need to test one you need to jumper two pins on the power supply cable. You can use a bent paper clip to act as the jumper. Jumper the green and black wires which are pins 13 and 14 on a 20-pin ATX power supply. More details about ATX power supply wiring can be found at this link.

With the Linux version of VMware Server there is a bug where only the person that created a virtual machine can see its window in the VMware client program. Any other user on the server can log into the VMware server client but they will only see a black screen in the guest machine’s window. The fix is to make the .vmx file for the virtual machine executable to all users that will be viewing it with the VMware server client program: